by J D Cortese
“I'm in a rush, and I am a Space Corps officer, so you won't have my records on the corporal database. I don't need to give them to you.”
Agdinar was trying to sound like one of those officers who occasionally visited Earth from one of Mars’s Tower cities.
...I can't satisfy your request without a registry number.
“I'm due for a meeting with the Overseer, and I need standard officer’s regalia. I can't wait for confirmation.” He was trying to sound military, using "I" as many times as he could.
...The configuration protocol requested requires a—
“You idiot computer,” he yelled, as upset as he could sound. “You're going to cost me a reprimand on my permanent record. Give me the suit; it's just a meeting, not a war. I am way too late to argue with you.”
...Do you want to keep your current suit in storage?
The machine had given up, taught by generations of AIs that a human temper cannot be negotiated with, and that, in the countless treatises between machines and humans, it had been stipulated that the weak-minded human would ultimately always be right.
Agdinar’s white suit started to dissolve in threads and disappeared into the orange plate; at the same time, blue snakes climbed along Agdinar's left leg, slithering and leaving a pulsing ensemble of circuits and energy lines. He wasn’t naked at any point in the transformation.
A minute later, he looked like a senior guard, with a new blue suit endowed with all the tools an officer carried. His inner viewer told him that the suit's weapons would be disabled until he left the building.
That was unfortunate, and it would compound his current problem, leaving the building before a processing alarm blared all over. And this would happen soon, when the Core realized that the clothes he had surrendered belonged to a patient supposedly confined in their secured medical facility.
Without saying anything else, Agdinar turned and walked the length of the platform, crossing with confidence into the air space. He was picked up by the antigravity machinery and his body started to spiral down on the outside of the enormous shaft. He was standing up, and the fear didn't let him look down.
The clock was ticking, and when it ran out of time, all those wandering robots would come after him.
* * *
The descending swirl deposited Agdinar on a vast platform, part office complex and part hangar. Even though he was used to the idea of their cities floating above the ground, the place was built on a scale that made him doubt its reality.
As soon as he passed a completely glass-made storage building, Agdinar entered a huge deposit area, next to the first of many rows of AVs and AVMs. They extended all the way to a wall opening where it seemed to be raining. The rain was just an effect of the instabilities of a defensive energy barrier. Even if he managed to steal one of the AVs, nothing would pass through that gap without a flightpath approved by Core Control.
He hid behind one of the first AVMs, as several white robots were checking each of the corridors with their scanners. These were slightly-larger-than-human patrol-robots, with weapons fully powered and ready. They would split his body in two if he stood and tried to walk toward the exits.
But it could get even worse, if the general alarm sounded. Then, the robots would actively search for him. And, on the ceiling twenty stories high above Agdinar, powerful targeting scanners could find him if his bioscans tagged him as an escapee.
...Yes, it's kind of impossible to get out of here.
“Dhern?”
...The always right and forever perfect one.
"I thought you couldn't talk with me and had to use visuals."
...Well, you are kind of dumb for those, and we are in trouble, big trouble, aren't we?
Agdinar was sometimes angry with Dhern's excessively human mannerisms and his joking tone. But having his help was going to be essential to survive, so he asked him, “And, do you have a solution?”
...Always, because even if you're dumb sometimes, these police-robots are total imbeciles all the time.
“How?”
...You take one and I take the other.
“What?”
His inner viewer illuminated one of the AVs, three rows away from him. It was the one he'd often used, with large scratches on the front looking as if a gigantic beast had pawed it, and it was flickering, its invisibility shield engaged. He loved that AV; it reminded him of many sunset flights over New York. The memory was fleeting but made him feel, against all reason, a little safer.
...I will take that one, while you mount this beauty.
The nearest AVM began to open a slot on its side; its wings were so black Agdinar could only see the opening in his viewers.
“Why me with the AVM? I don't know them very well.”
...You're going to need all the power you can get to beat those bastards in the down-world.
Agdinar suddenly felt nauseated and retched, compelled to vomit the little he'd had time to finish of his last lunch. It was a small liquid puddle, but he was stunned by how it looked.
A silver blotch was sitting right in the middle of the disgusting splash. It pulsated and then started to move, skittering at great speed toward the site of Agdinar's old AV.
It was Dhern.
“Good luck, my friend,” Agdinar said, without his past irony.
* * *
It should have been easy to cross the gap between the rows of transports and slide under the AVM, but the alarm started blaring before Agdinar could move. Dhern was on his way to the AV, visible as a little silver trail that zigzagged between the parked transports.
At least a dozen patrol-robots were arriving at the depot’s entrance, monitored from behind by a whole platoon of guards in blue uniform, and probably upset that someone had interrupted their morning meetings.
There was nowhere to go for Agdinar, and, with the alarm on, exposing himself to cross between the vehicles would make him a target for the air-robots circling above and a destination for everybody who was searching for the prisoner on the run.
He tried to stand and then hesitated, as this would have been suicide.
He tried to think but couldn't shake his state of confusion and despair.
Dhern had crossed the entire length of the gap to reach the civilian transports' section and would be inside the AV in seconds.
Agdinar needed a plan, and soon.
The two nearest patrol-robots were only two rows behind his and would see him as soon as they reached it.
...There must be a way to distract these damned robots.
Agdinar shivered at the immediate view of the AVM's control panel.
It was Dhern, showing him an image in his secure visual mode. He hadn't lost the deep communication with his friend; only the physical matter had left Agdinar’s body. Somehow, a mind-link remained.
Agdinar thought hard on the AVM's controls, all those weapons and power equipment.
The best defense was always a good attack.
The AVM rose a little above the floor, silent while several lights turned on around the cabin. It had so many weapons it could dispose of the robots in an instant, and it also had, above all of them, the one thing Agdinar wanted.
A military-grade suit’s control link.
His suit powered up, turning a lighter shade of blue; he didn't waste any time on switching it to invisibility. He had to make it to the transport soon, or the hordes of robots would detect him; it was now just a matter of training their sensors on his biological scent.
A robot was entering the open row that separated him from the AVM. He couldn't run across and enter the AVM, but that didn't mean he couldn't get there.
Agdinar stood, knowing his invisibility was mostly a visual gimmick, and he could be found out by the robot if it hacked into the suit’s engine signature.
He breathed in, aware of the pain he was going to endure, and turned on the transiency generator. Without waiting for the sensation of weightlessness to fade, he ran across his side of the row of pa
rked vehicles, passing through one after another.
The pain and dizziness were unbearable; straightening himself, he kept going.
One of the robots turned toward his wake, its sensors detecting the subatomic distortions spreading from his suit. It powered its hand weapon but hesitated to engage it in a floor crowded with vehicles full of explosives and energy weapons.
The space-time waves coming away from each contact with an AV echoed all over the platform; for the robot, it was like tracking a fish using a primitive sonar machine.
Agdinar had counted on some confusion, but not the paralysis of all these robots as they tried to capture him without wrecking—or blowing up—irreplaceable air transports.
The pain wanted him to stop, but he forced himself to keep going and crossed perpendicularly the gap between a row of parked vehicles. He knew that he would be detected, but those land robots wouldn't be able to reach him quickly without also using transiency. The upside was that transiency would disable their weapons and greatly confuse the tracking of his suit's signals.
Agdinar crouched down near the floor and slid below the AVM Dhern had linked to his suit. The machine recognized him, and he found himself seated at the controls.
An AVM was so sophisticated as to have its own elevator. Agdinar had vanished from the floor and flipped into the cockpit by an unfathomable magic of atoms reassigned to a different coordinate in space-time.
He wasn't up for much theory right then and powered up the engines for departure. Blue light grew all around the black arrow, and it made it raise above the others.
And it also vanished, automatically transient.
The robots fired the weapons at the AVM—three or four of them at once—and a blaze of red light illuminated the entire chamber.
And he saw his old AV also in the air, with Dhern in command.
Their battle had begun.
The AVM moved too fast for Agdinar to control it, rushing around the platform while changing angles with the ground and jumping vertically to different altitudes. The transport spun in the air like an arrow would, and then it used its transiency to rush through the parked air-vehicles.
The robots couldn't cope with this fast-moving air show, and they just kept firing wildly, hitting some of the transports; fire and smoke created a moving wall of darkness that immediately covered the platform.
Dhern had been flying the AV behind Agdinar, lacking the firepower and shielding of the AVM, but able to fly so close to the robots that some toppled over and two were blasted away by the air wave the AV generated. Unfortunately, their stolen fliers were trapped on the platform, and soon other AVMs would be flying as comfortably as theirs and targeting the pair from all angles—three of the guards had already managed to enter their military transports and were going through their powering-up protocols.
There was little time left before they were caught and maybe killed in the process.
...Agdinar, head up to the gate.
He was surprised to hear Dhern using his name, but more so by his suggestion to try crashing the gate. Transiency or not, the gate's curtain would slice their vehicles down to single atoms if they tried to cross it without clearance.
...Don't worry, just let me approach you.
Suddenly, Agdinar lost even the little control he had over the AVM, and Dhern’s AV approached him in a parallel flight path. They went together, flying low around the room, their wings almost touching.
One of the AVMs was now rising, only halfway from the outside gate. Its weapons were warming up.
The two stolen transports—both driven by Dhern—swiveled and turned around, heading straight to the floating AVM that opposed their exit. Agdinar's AVM was moving much faster, and the AV fell behind.
Agdinar turned to see what had happened with his AI friend. He was surprised to see that his own wing had a large silver blot on top of the black background.
It was Dhern; he was with him again.
Agdinar’s AVM made a hard stop in the air, which he felt deep in his stomach. And then, the AV shot upwards from underneath them and darted forward like a missile. It took a wing off an AVM that was ahead and confronting them; a large orange ball of flames burst from its side as it fell on top of a nearby row of AVs.
Before Agdinar could see the explosion coming from the crash, Dhern’s AV, now smoking and beginning to burn, activated its power drive and rushed toward the gate. Agdinar's AVM reacted in unison, starting a fast pursuit of the flaming AV.
Agdinar saw the flash as his beloved AV, the one he'd stolen so many times for his escapades, vanished in a cloud of atoms.
The explosion had cut a hole in the curtain's flickering shower, big enough for his AVM to pass through.
Another AVM was on their tail, trying to pass the curtain before it resealed, but it lost a wing and much of its fuselage on impact. The energy barrier covered the gap like a turquoise waterfall.
They were in the air, and the bluish light inside the cabin meant they were invisible again. And alone again.
It was time to go back to the city below and find Sarinda.
Chapter 38
Agdinar took a good look at the docking door as the AVM flew around the floating building. As it moved closer, his window could cope with the invisibility shield, and he saw the fires burning around the door's edge. When the AVM finally moved away, the entire building ghosted into a cloudy patch of sky.
He would miss the old, trusted AV of so many night escapades, but not the Towers. If he never came back, it would be fine with him.
He unthinkingly touched the control panel, knowing that the machine would read his mind and plot a course; that was the extent of human input the AVM needed, its AI so sophisticated it could have revolutionized the world below. He looked at the right wing, where some self-repairs were being run to fix damage from the robots' energy blasters. He would leave the AVM to nurse its wounds while they flew out of New York, beyond the edges of Tower City; they would be safe out there from scanners and other AVMs.
As for Dhern, a little silver stripe was growing toward the cabin. He would be with him soon enough.
And then what?
* * *
…Well, there went nothing.
“Sorry, Dhern. I feel so stupid.”
…I want to hear this, just for my personal enjoyment.
“I’d thought that coming back to the Towers would give me, I don’t know, a lot of information so I could save Sarinda. Right what I did wrong and return the timeline to before I screwed it up.”
...That has been a fantasy of humans since the time they were hunting mammoths.
“Please, Dhern,” Agdinar said, “I’m serious.” He was fighting a nervous shake, massaging his hands as if they were numb. “I don’t know why I did it. I think that I just wanted to come back, forget everything, and return my life to what it was. I was afraid, and I wanted the chaos to stop.” Agdinar had a flashback of Tysa falling off the High Line and shuddered.
…It is a good point, and since we’re helplessly floating around, go ahead.
“Now, I can see it,” Agdinar continued, “that I had true friends: Vaxeer, Bethlana. They do love me—now I know—and it’s almost as if I had a family. I’d wanted that, and now, it even seems that I had a real father, not a gene machine that made me to order.”
Dhern’s silence spoke volumes about what he might have known about that.
Agdinar kept talking, ignoring the silence. “I think that I’d thought I could get away with going back. Take my punishment and return to a watchstation. But it can’t happen…it is like William said, we need to bring friends, the kind that carry big guns.” He touched the AVM’s console. Being there was a big step in the direction of arming themselves; the thing was nothing like the tourist AV they had just gotten vaporized.
…A good point, but I don’t know how we’re going to get back your friend without a vast search of the city’s cameras.
“I don’t know,” Agdinar said, “but the Eye
was trying to tell me something with its weird vision.”
…I lost you at the Eye…You haven’t seen the Eye, have you? You know that it’s just a name for our wide-range computers.
Agdinar directed his knowing smile to no one in particular. After years of knowing Dhern, this was the first time he knew something his invisible friend didn’t. It made up for some of the uncertainty he had about everything else.
* * *
In those few minutes they flew over the outskirts of the city boroughs, Agdinar weighed what he did know about where Sarinda might be. The Great Eye had given him some visual hints, but they were hard to figure—after all, the Eye was their greatest AI, and a human mind was no more than that of an insect compared to the great intelligence in the purple sun.
The thing wasn't even a completely human construct, as it operated between universes, spreading its operating tentacles into the larger Multiverse.
In and out of alternative realities.
The Eye might have given him views that were not of this Earth, or even of his own time. They might have been pictures of alternative timelines, connected with the truth of his world but designed to be unreadable by computer decoders. They should make sense only to him.
He remembered the view of a darkened hall, and now noted there had been some scaffolds against the walls, as if it were being painted anew. The extensive workaround made it hard to recognize, but Agdinar had been there, in that same hall, although in its future, and quite nervous by the presence of hundreds of Hawknights.
The Dinkins Municipal Building in the City Hall District.
Of course, they had taken Sarinda back to the Hawks' lair.
...Looks like you didn't need my help.
“I always do,” he said out loud. “And you can start by taking over this thing.”
...This thing is as smart as I am, my fellow escapist.
“I still hate to drive it.”
...Don't worry, she knows already what you want. Look.
Agdinar saw—but he didn't feel, as the AVM compensated for any acceleration shifts—that they were making a hard turn to go back toward New York City.